this world's a shitshow
by danickzta
Summary: In which Murphy begrudgingly comforts a devastated Clarke. He doesn't care. He swears. Set immediately after the events of {3.07}.
**title:** this world's a shitshow
 **summary:** In which Murphy begrudgingly comforts a devastated Clarke. He doesn't care. He swears. Set immediately after the events of {3.07}.

my take on how i think our favorite, tactless jackass would deal with a mourning Clarke (hint: it's not delicately)

* * *

Murphy tries the door for what feels like the hundredth time. He wonders if this is karma's way of mocking him—escaping one locked room only to get stuck in another.

 _Oh_ , the irony.

If he thinks about it ( _he tries not to_ ), he realizes that ever since they landed ( _were forcibly ejected_ ) on the ground, he's been a prisoner in one form or another, more often than not a captive of his own people. Unwanted. Only treated with a modicum of dignity ( _if you can call it that_ ) when he's a means to an end.

Murphy wants to pound his fist into a wall.

He's about to do just that when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a stilted movement and hears a strangled sob. Murphy sighs in frustration and turns toward the mess of unkempt blond hair and stifled cries kneeling at the foot of the bed he was tied to not ten minutes ago.

For a moment, he just stands there, watches Clarke. He's still pissed that she had the nerve to call him a "friend." What a fucking joke. The lie rankles him, feeds his animosity toward this girl and everything she stands for. Everything she's done to him, everything she's ever accused him of.

The months have done nothing to dull his ( _righteous_ ) outrage, and he finds that the very sight of her still inspires a pit of bitter hatred in his gut. It feels like she was exiling him to certain death only yesterday. But it wasn't yesterday. It's been months, and Murphy finds that as isolated as he's been from it all, he has no idea what's going on—he feels like he's been thrust into a story mid-plot twist and he lacks the necessary chapters to piece it all together. All he knows is that he's glad no one's actively dying in his vicinity anymore; before, the room was a whirlwind of emotions that he just couldn't understand. Sympathy just isn't in his repertoire.

He grimaces as Clarke cradles a bloody, rumpled sheet to her chest ( _he absently wonders what she would do if he just sauntered up to her and snatched it away._ )

Murphy knows that he shouldn't particularly care about her misery ( _because let's be real—Clarke's never seemed to give two shits about him before_ ), but ever since Emori, he's started to have _feelings_ about people that he's never had ( _wanted_ ) before.

He sees her trembling hands clutching at the bloody bed, the way she's trying so desperately to keep it together, and there's this feeling like unease furrowing its way underneath his skin and zeroing his focus on the slight shaking of her shoulders.

And he would never _ever_ admit it to anyone, but he's shocked to find that he's bothered by it. Absolutely appalled. Because what has _Clarke Griffin_ , their glorified lord and savior,ever done for him? Besides banish and blame and betray?

He hates her almost as much as he hates himself.

But when he looks at her, it's as if all of their time on the ground falls away, as if none of it matters anymore ( _even though it should, dammit_ ). All he sees is a girl who's just lost someone who's obviously important to her ( _Murphy's still struggling to put together exactly how Clarke and the would-be murderer of her former lover became all buddy-buddy_ ), and he can't help but see a mirror image of himself the day he came home to his Mother lying face down in a pool of her own vomit.

But tact has never been his strong suit.

"No use crying about it now, Princess. Time to move on."

Clarke stills, her grip on the sheets tightening until her knuckles go white. "… I haven't been called that in a long time," she whispers.

"Yeah? Well, I guess you stopped being better than the rest of us the day you started choosing who lives and who dies."

For a long moment, Clarke's silence folds into the current of disquiet permeating the room, but then she's turning around and fixing her eyes somewhere over his shoulder. And they look so dead inside that, if Murphy wasn't so well acquainted with his own personal purgatory, he'd feel uncomfortable.

"I guess I did. Is that what you want to hear?"

Murphy studies her. He doesn't see the reaction he was gunning for, sees nothing of the self-righteous girl who loathed him all those months ago. So he scoffs.

"Yeah, well. Too little, too late."

When she still does nothing but ( _creepily_ ) stare off into the distance, Murphy shoves down the regret niggling at the back of his mind and edges into her line of sight. "So what now? We're locked in here—the Grounders are probably blaming us for this and getting ready to torture us to death. You know this hellhole better than I do. How do we escape?"

Clarke just shrugs her shoulders, wrings her hands together and hangs her head until her hair falls limply into her eyes.

"Hey. I'm talking to you," he scowls. "I don't know about you, but I didn't survive all this time just to crawl up in a corner and wait for it all to end."

"Just leave me alone, Murphy," Clarke says, but with none of her usual fire, none of the usual derision that accompanies everything she says to him.

Murphy snorts and shoots a disapproving look at a spot of dried blood on his boot. _His own blood of course_. Anything is better than looking at _her_. He doesn't know why it's falling to him to knock some sense into her. ( _where's her other half when you need him?_ ) But he's not about to just roll over and wait for the next Commander to kill them.

( _it occurs to him that he could just go, leave her here and try to find a way out himself. but when he looks at the tears streaking her face, he realizes that he can't. and as soon as he thinks it, he shoves the realization down into a special corner of his soul called "things that shall never be shared."_ )

He knows he's being cruel, but he just can't seem to stop. "That's it? You're just gonna give up? Lie here and, what? Sulk about it?"

Clarke stiffens, and she drags her eyes over to his. "Shut up."

"No, tell me. Tell me why you get to decide to just give up. Tell me why your grief is more important than everyone else's. Tell me why it's not worth it to you anymore—"

Suddenly, she's shooting up and getting in his face, seizing his collar in her hands and yanking him toward her. "You don't know… You don't know what I've had to do!" she shouts. "How much I've lost… How many _people_ I've—"

It's harder than it should be to ignore the anguish dripping from her every word, but Murphy manages anyway. In fact, he revels in it. She looks positively murderous, eyes blazing, jaw set, shoulders shaking ( _but for an entirely different reason than before_ ). He feels her fury in the barely concealed contempt of her glare, the grinding of her teeth and twitching of her fingers. She's pissed, but at least she's no longer crying into a puddle of blood.

Murphy smirks. "That's more like it."

Clarke's eyes widen, and she looks like she maybe wants to take a swing at him ( _and the shame of it is, he'd probably let her_ ), but then the corners of her lips are plunging downward and the tension in her features is loosening. She shoves him away and whirls back toward the bed, wrapping her arms around herself and trying to choke back what he assumes are angry sobs.

For a moment, Murphy just watches her. Appraises her, feeling about as useless as Jasper on a good day. He's all for riling her up, can think of no other word that goes with "Clarke" quite as nicely as "provocation," but _dammit_ , he hears the harsh grating of her pants and feels the lingering warmth of her hands at his throat ( _feels her grief reel him in like a gravitational pull_ ), and he just can't reconcile this girl with the one who threw him to the wolves what seems like ages ago.

So he sighs and swallows his pride ( _what's left of it, anyway_ ). He steps forward and reaches out, places a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey. We've all lost something, Clarke. That's just how it is down here. One big shitshow. But you can't just shut down because—and I can't believe I'm saying this—there are people who need you." ( _he wants to say "we need you," but there is no "we." not since Raven tried to throw him to the Grounders and he followed after Jaha like an idiot all those months ago. not since he fucked everything up. not since Charlotte.)_

Clarke takes a deep breath. "They haven't needed me for months," she chokes out.

Murphy rolls his eyes. "Don't be melodramatic. If there's one thing I know, it's that all of those idiots at the Dropship would've been dead in a day if it weren't for you and Bellamy. Hell, I probably would've killed them myself."

She shoots him a hostile glare and, when he doesn't bend under the deafening force of her hatred, returns to running her fingers over the drying patches of black on the bed. ( _Murphy's beyond trying to figure out why the hell the Commander bled out in anything other than red._ )

"Look, you can believe me or not, but I'm not here for a pity party. One way or another, I'm getting out of here. Are you in, or are you just gonna give up?"

When she still does nothing but stare despondently ahead, Murphy finds that he's getting irrationally angry, which makes him even more angry because _what does he care if Clarke fucking Griffin_ _comes to her senses?_

The corner of Murphy's mouth screws up. "I see how it is. Screw Camp Jaha, right? You and I are birds of a feather."

"We're nothing alike," she spits.

"Well then how about you get off your ass and prove it to me?" And if Murphy wasn't aggressively ignoring her as passionately as he was, he would've missed the almost imperceptible tightening of her fists, the intake of breath and straightening of her shoulders.

"I've got nothing to prove," she snarls.

Murphy smirks. ( _the fire is back, and he welcomes the accompanying disdain like a well-worn jacket._ ) He claps his hands together. "Fan-fucking-tastic. Then let's get this show on the road."

Clarke takes one last, longing look at the grisly mess of a bed, then takes a step toward him and hastily wipes the wetness from her cheeks ( _he can pinpoint the exact second her mask slams back into place_ ). "As soon as this is over, we're done," she snaps.

"Believe me—feeling's mutual. But no matter what, you've got to be better company than Jaha. He's his own special brand of crazy."

She ignores him, banging her shoulder into his when she shoves past him and makes her way toward a frayed tapestry on the wall. She yanks it aside and digs her nails into the surface until a section of the plaster comes away and a corridor of darkness yawns before them.

A secret passageway. Naturally. ( _it's such a goddamn cliché that Murphy wants to burst into laughter._ )

She tugs a torch off the wall and strides forward without waiting for him. When he finishes rolling his eyes ( _again with the drama?_ ), he catches up and seals the entryway behind him, falling into step beside her.

After what seems like hours of studiously ignoring one another ( _but what's probably only a few minutes of awkward silence_ ), Murphy chances a look at the girl beside him. He takes in her profile, flickering in the dim light, catches sight of another tear slinking down her face. And he wants to bang his head into the concrete walls because of these goddamn _feelings_ — They don't have time for this, so he does what he does best and channels his inner jackass.

"You know, I was tortured because of you," he sneers, breaking their standstill. "That bald asshole was like a broken record."

Clarke keeps marching ahead. "I'll add that to the list of things I need to make up for," she says, voice devoid of any humor.

Murphy shoves down the guilt that threatens to claw its way to the surface. He doesn't care that he's hurting her more, _he doesn't_. Not if it means that they'll be out of this goddamn trash heap of a city and one step closer to Emori that much sooner.

"Good. Why don't you add blaming me for Finn's death while you're at it?"

Clarke's knuckles go white at her sides. "If you don't keep up, I'm leaving you behind." And then she picks up the pace and disappears into the black.

Murphy's not an idiot. He can tell that she's _angry_. Furious with him ( _with the fact that he's here, that he's an asshole, that she'd rather be with anyone else but_ him _right now)._ But at least she's not broken anymore.

It's mission accomplished as far as he's concerned, and that's good enough for him.

* * *

 _ **{fin.}**_


End file.
